Homebrew Project Proposition: Remote audio endpoint/player

[cr08]

First off let me state that I am not a programmer by any stretch of the term. I can do debugging here and there and comprehend C-like code, but beyond that is greek to me.

Anyways, this is a project proposition in hopes someone here more knowledgeable would (hopefully) become interested in it and pick it up and make it a reality.

Currently there is a plugin/daemon combo designed for winamp where a small daemon is run on one machine (lets call it machine B) running windows or linux and then on another machine running winamp (call it machine A) and you run a supplied output plugin which does nothing more than feed the raw decoded PCM audio after the input and DSP plugins have done their thing and that PCM stream goes over to the network to machine B where it's played verbatim in near realtime (noticable lag, but maybe in the realm of 50ms tops. Probably network related most of the time) over the primary sound card on the system.

The way I see it is that the Wii is a prime device to go as machine B in this case. Granted, it doesn't have digital audio output. But the sound chipset is pretty high quality that I recall and the output as-is is pretty easy to feed into a home audio setup. All in all, a real nice setup for an application like this.

The plugin/daemon combo in question is available here and includes the source code for both pieces ready to go. All that would need to be done is recode what's needed in the daemon code just enough to get the audio output through the Wii's audio functionality and that would be about it (MAY need a resampler to get anything but 48khz audio up to that point. Don't know how well the audio chipset in the Wii handles non-native audio resolutions.)

I can, though, provide some help on the audio side if needed.

Cheers!

 

[FAST6191]

Until such a thing is done even the old flash based browser video streamer allows audio to be played. Some of the new mplayer and geexbox stuff have some half decent network capabilities too.

 

[cr08]

Until such a thing is done even the old flash based browser video streamer allows audio to be played. Some of the new mplayer and geexbox stuff have some half decent network capabilities too.

I am fully aware of these, unfortunately they handle a whole different goal entirely. At least for mplayer and geexbox, you are limited to what media files can be accessed there, what formats they can read, etc.. Geexbox also does not currently have wifi capability (a dealbreaker for most, including myself). Mplayer can only really do one file playback at a time instead of a full playlist and still has some showstopper bugs that kills its reliability. -- The idea with the winamp plugin here though is that whatever you can currently do with winamp (or even any application that can utilize winamp plugins. I think foobar is capable? As well as a small handful of others) right down to file format access, DSP usage, playlist/library control, etc.. is all still possible and happens PC side. Difference is the audio can be fed to a much better quality audio output device rather than is what usually lousy computer speakers, headphones, onboard sound, or all of the above.

FWIW though I do happily use the latest version of mplayer with samba browsing support which covers much of my needs. But this function would be a nice boon to some here if they realised exactly what it did and that it was either available or possible.